[flagged]
So you are a potential 'customer' for this product you say?
Launch HN: Fastgen (YC W23) – Visual Low-Code Backend Builder
101–110 of 118 posts
Re: Launch HN: Fastgen (YC W23) – Visual Low-Code Backend Builder
#102[flagged]
This is so clearly written by ChatGPT, as are a few other comments in your history
Re: Launch HN: Fastgen (YC W23) – Visual Low-Code Backend Builder
#103Body validation is too simple, for example I want the be able to configure the min max from the DB or interdependent validation i.e. if you pass in and Id and a search string I want to return an error. The DB Query editor is too simple requiring the user to manually create sql queries rather than visually build them. The DB editor doesn't allow foreign keys and complex DB relationships to be defined visually as well.…
wow. Seriously you're probably expecting too much from a low-code solution! No platform is going to have everything you can imagine in it.
No checked the other reply the dude from the company is saying all this will be in their product eventually. I think they launched very early.
Re: Launch HN: Fastgen (YC W23) – Visual Low-Code Backend Builder
#104Body validation is too simple, for example I want the be able to configure the min max from the DB or interdependent validation i.e. if you pass in and Id and a search string I want to return an error. The DB Query editor is too simple requiring the user to manually create sql queries rather than visually build them. The DB editor doesn't allow foreign keys and complex DB relationships to be defined visually as well.…
Thanks a lot for your extensive feedback! It's detailed comments like this that help us improve and meet users needs. Let me address each of your points: Body validation, DB Query editor & DB features: Definitely understand your need for more complex validation and query building. We're still in public beta, and building out and refining our features is a continuous process. We're working on improving these areas for…
There is something increasingly misaligned with SaaS companies offering mission critical products (like databases or backends), that's bordering on delusions of grandeur.
If you are offering anything that has to deeply and critically integrate with my company and you are not exactly google, you will have to make it super obvious how I can practically outlive you without paying an insane price, before I would even ever consider adoption. Considering the trajectory that most startups take after a couple of years, it's just irresponsible to take it on as an additional risk.
That means practically, if you want to sell me on your SaaS (which I am happy to pay for, as long as you can offer it) I need a clear and guaranteed way to migrate to self-hosting if I must, without me asking. Right now, Vercel is a good example of how to do this right.
Re: Launch HN: Fastgen (YC W23) – Visual Low-Code Backend Builder
#105My question is: who is the intended customer? As a software dev who is confident with coding I would not use this because I don't want to lock myself to a platform (vendor lock-in). Someone who is a rookie might use it but it seems that it requires more than basic knowleadge (e.g. REST, SQL, auth, etc).
If you're looking for a similar solution that has 0 vendor lock in, checkout https://www.flyde.dev. It's still WIP but Open-Source and comes with a VSCode extension. I'm planning on launching it soon as well :)
Re: Launch HN: Fastgen (YC W23) – Visual Low-Code Backend Builder
#106Pricing is crazy. team plan with 2 million actions ($300 is already expensive for this) + $29k? This is not realistic in any way.
Appreciate the feedback. We launched our pricing plan this week after being in private beta with a different pricing strategy. We did chat with our private beta users about what would be important to them but are very open to change pricing over time based on feedback from the community. Keep in mind we're providing more than just the execution of actions i.e. offering a visual development environment, an integrated…
As others have already said, you can get millions of executions of serverless functions for literal pennies on other platforms.
These serverless platforms already tend to cost A LOT more than running traditional servers, but your offering is 200,000 times pricier than an already costly option.
One thing to note here is that those traditional providers charge per request, while your product is priced on actions, which are blocks in the request flow. Realistically, any non-basic API will have several blocks for each request, thus considerably inflating your numbers.
To put things in perspective here, 1 Req/s is 2.5M Req/Mo which is already over your highest plan, and while it may be a considerable amount of volume for a medium app, it’s still something you could run on a $5 VPS and have 99% of your CPU sitting idle. For your proposed pricing, you could literally deploy tens or hundreds of dedicated servers around the world for each client that signs up and still end up being ridiculously overpriced.
As another example, given the current Reddit debacle, we know that an average user of theirs makes ~380 API Req/day. This means that 175 users would saturate the 2M actions in your highest Team plan. How would you justify 30.000$ for 175 MAU?
If these prices are somehow based on your costs for hosting the API you seriously need to rethink your internal efficiency
That said, I like the style and concept of the product, but there are still too many missing features, especially to justify a price that’s many orders of magnitude higher than anyone else.
Re: Launch HN: Fastgen (YC W23) – Visual Low-Code Backend Builder
#107Hi, I like this! I'm curious what drove the decision to use the vertical block builder style you chose. I'm partial to node-based editors and have been building things with React Flow recently. LangFlow [1] is a good example, but there's lots of UIs that use a similar interface (e.g. Blender [2] and Unity [3]). [1] https://github.com/logspace-ai/langflow [2] https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/3.5/interface/controls/n…
Hi there! Ah, the design of our interface... You've just touched on a topic that's seen more passionate debates in our team than whether pineapple belongs on pizza. In the end, we chose to go with a vertical layout mainly for simplicity and intuitiveness. The vertical block builder provides a linear, straightforward visual representation of the workflow, which can be easily understood at a glance and aligns well with…
The workflow UI looks really good. Nice work! Was that totaly built in house or is it based on a library?
Re: Launch HN: Fastgen (YC W23) – Visual Low-Code Backend Builder
#108Body validation is too simple, for example I want the be able to configure the min max from the DB or interdependent validation i.e. if you pass in and Id and a search string I want to return an error. The DB Query editor is too simple requiring the user to manually create sql queries rather than visually build them. The DB editor doesn't allow foreign keys and complex DB relationships to be defined visually as well.…
Thanks a lot for your extensive feedback! It's detailed comments like this that help us improve and meet users needs. Let me address each of your points: Body validation, DB Query editor & DB features: Definitely understand your need for more complex validation and query building. We're still in public beta, and building out and refining our features is a continuous process. We're working on improving these areas for…
What happened to the previous company that you raised $100M for? Is it a SaaS? Is it still operating?
Re: Launch HN: Fastgen (YC W23) – Visual Low-Code Backend Builder
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks a lot for your extensive feedback! It's detailed comments like this that help us improve and meet users needs. Let me address each of your points: Body validation, DB Query editor & DB features: Definitely understand your need for more complex validation and query building. We're still in public beta, and building out and refining our features is a continuous process. We're working on improving these areas for…
There is something increasingly misaligned with SaaS companies offering mission critical products (like databases or backends), that's bordering on delusions of grandeur. If you are offering anything that has to deeply and critically integrate with my company and you are not exactly google, you will have to make it super obvious how I can practically outlive you without paying an insane price, before I would even eve…
And Quantum Metrics is a good example of how to do it wrong - no easy way to export and/or migrate. Vendor lock-in sucks.
Re: Launch HN: Fastgen (YC W23) – Visual Low-Code Backend Builder
#110How is this different from Strapi? How can a query for data using logical operators? Example: GET all log entries from 1/1/2022 until 1/1/2023 AND created by Joe OR Mary
Hi there, Mike CEO of Fastgen here, jumping in for Costa. Strapi is a headless CMS and focuses on Content Delivery to a Frontend. Fastgen is a lowcode backend builder and is putting a stronger focus on application logic, triggering workflows, and moving data around between different sources. So there can be a slight overlap but it is not very large. If you want to query data from the connected database in Fastgen, yo…
Ok, so this is like Camunda?